GSA declares end to cube farms, unveils new approach to office space

Jason Miller reports.

The General Services Administration has enlisted four other agencies to jump on
their workplace transformation bandwagon.

As part of the renovation of its headquarters building in Washington, D.C., GSA
did away
with office cube farms and private offices. Instead, employees now work in open
spaces, use software to reserve desks and conference rooms in advance and are
strongly encouraged to telework often.

This is the new workplace many GSA employees call home. It's bright, modern and
focused on bringing people together. The carpet is a mix of greens and browns, and
every employee work area includes a laptop docking station, a 22-inch monitor and
a connection to the network where Internet and phone services are provided.

In the common areas, GSA gives employees tables and chairs similar to those found
at a local coffee shop — low to the ground, round seats with no backs. The
goal is to promote impromptu, short collaboration sessions.

Very few employees have a permanent desk. They reserve a desk the day or two
before they need it by using a reservation website called Book-It, which runs on
software developed by AgilQuest.

Employees just have to drop their laptop in the docking station and they are ready
to work.

Multiple ways to work

Bob Stafford, the Internal Workplace Management Division Director in GSA's office
of administrative services, led a tour Thursday of the new workspace.

"What we are walking through right now is a couple of different working conditions
we created in the building. Both some open collaborative space where someone could
come in, touch down, set up their laptop, work off the wireless network and be
here for a couple of hours or have a very small meeting out it the open," Stafford
said. "Or, a number of reservable conference rooms that all have white boards in
them so you can reserve up to 8 or 10 people to be able to have these types of
meetings. We've tried to replicate these types of work spaces throughout the
building so no matter where you are, you are not very far away from being access
any space you might need."

GSA also created a larger conference center that can accommodate up to 250 people.
The room has movable walls to reduce the size of the room as needed, and the
officials can rearrange the furniture in any number of designs to meet the
conference needs.

Many of the new conference rooms have a little screen attached to the wall and if
the room is available, a green light is lit. If it's been reserved, it's red.
Stafford said employees looking for a conference room can easily look down a
hallway and find a green light and reserve the room right on the touch screen.

The renovated work areas also have large windows providing natural light.

"That's one of the benefits of the renovation," he said. "As you will see as we
walk this space, we were able to eliminate interior corridors, flood the space
with light, leverage some of the daylight so we don't have to utilize electrical
light and saving energy, and make the space a lot more pleasant to be in."

Changing the layout adds more space

During phase one of the renovation of the headquarters building, GSA created
50,000 more usable square feet of office space. It increased the number of
employees who work out of the headquarters building to 3,300 from 2,200.

Stafford said now there are two employees for every one workstation, meaning telework is highly encouraged.

Stafford said as part of the consolidation of workspace, there are new centrally
located copying and printing service centers on the floors.

"We've reduced the number of personal printers, and now we are sharing printers on
a ratio of 25-to-1. ... Everyone is networked into them so they can print to these
devices. Things like common supplies like pens, paper and all that stuff we have
more than we know what to do with it — we consolidated from six different
locations into these services. We will see a lot of efficiency associated with
that type of consolidation, as opposed to every single organization buying their
own paper clips, their own staplers and that type of thing."

Even with the new open space set up, GSA gives employees personal space in the
form of lockers located throughout each of the floors.

Stafford said each locker is about 18"x18"x12" and has electronic combination
locks to keep professional and personal belongings secure.

Stafford added he expects GSA to complete the consolidation under phase one by
October.

Ran out of money

GSA has held off on phase 2 of the building's renovation because of
budget reductions. Instead, GSA spent about $8 million to refresh the current old
office space.

Stafford said in the refreshed, but not renovated area, GSA painted the hallways,
installed new carpet in the offices and ensured employees had the same furniture
and workstations as those in the new office space.

"We went from having typically about two people per bay [workstation], given that
configuration, to as many as six per bay," he said. "Typical right now in the
building is four people per bay, so basically doubling the efficiency of the
space."

GSA also created a glass paneled atrium where the light streams in on a sunny day,
and a new entrance on C Street, which is expected to open in the coming weeks.

The new office space, GSA hopes, is what every federal agency will look like in
the next five years.

Dan Tangherlini, the administrator of GSA, said over the next two years, 25
percent of all federal leases will expire.

"Agencies, frankly, need us now more than at any other time in our history. With
the financial constraint that agencies are feeling every day, and the fact that
that constraint isn't going away anytime soon, agencies need to be able to look
how they are spending their money, look at their fixed costs, look at things that
are in their baseline and ask themselves, 'How can they make that variable? How
can they push that back into program? How can they push that back into the
services that they provide the American people?" Tangherlini said. "So that's part
of what we are doing. Work with our agency partners to recognize this constraint
also represents an opportunity for us to rethink the way we lay out our office,
the way we work, the way we interact, and that's what the Total Workplace effort
on the part of GSA is trying to do."

Money and efficiencies

He said the reasons for transforming the workplace are two-fold. The first is all
about money. GSA already saved $24 million in rent by consolidating six locations
into its headquarters building. It also saved another $7 million in related
operational and administrative costs.

"Now that's money, the way the GSA program is developed, that will go back into
other federal buildings. It will go back into investments in windows, in roofs, in
energy efficiency that actually will have long-term savings to the federal
government overall," Tangherlini said. "Look if we are not spending money on
things we don't need, call it savings, call it cost avoidance, what I call it is a
reduction in waste, and that's the kind of thing we are really focused on doing
with our agency partners."

The second reason for transforming the workplace is to improve efficiency and
effectiveness. GSA officials say by bringing people closer together and
encouraging
collaboration through the open space plan, they are creating an environment that
works better.

Several agencies are taking GSA up on the help and advice to transform their
office space.

The Homeland Security Department spends more than $1 billion a year on rent.

By working with GSA, DHS is reducing the amount of square feet per employee to
less than 150 from an average 200.

Jeffery Orner, the chief readiness support officer at DHS, said the transformation
of the workplace will start with the offices at the St. Elizabeths complex in
Washington.

"We were planning to put 14,000 people there. Well we are still planning to build
out 14,000 seats, but we will now put well over 20,000 people there, enabling us
to cancel leases elsewhere in the country," Orner said. "We are expecting to save
a projected $55 million annually in office real estate costs and achieve a 25
percent reduction by roughly 2018 to 2020."

He said the savings are real. For example, up until 2 years ago, Orner's office
was spending an extra $1 million a year on rent. He said without those savings in
light of the budget cuts, he would have had to find money from the staff in terms
of not hiring new workers or holding off on filling open positions.

Others on the bandwagon

The departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services and Interior also are
following suit in changing their office space.

HHS has a pilot in Seattle where it is reducing office space to 70,000 square
feet from 95,000square feet and expects to save about $15 million.

USDA's National Agriculture Statistical Service consolidated to 12 regional
offices from 43 locations and cut its office space square footage by more than
200,000.

Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service moved into a new building, reduced its
total square footage by 72,000 and improved how employees work together.

Tangherlini said he wants agencies to know GSA understands it's not a one-size
fits all approach to the workplace. He said the cubicle farms of the 1980s and
1990s were forced on to everybody no matter how they worked.

Tangherlini said the goal is to find what's right for each agency that will save
money and improve overall efficiency of how they meet their mission.